Well, this isn’t so much a new decision as it is making an ongoing situation official: Read About Comics is, for the time being, entering hibernation.

I’d hoped to be back on a regular schedule last summer, but after about a month a lot of things that pay the bills got much much busier, to say nothing about currently working on a Masters in Library and Information Science. And so once again, something had to give, and that something was Read About Comics.

I started writing reviews regularly for iComics.com back in 1999, and then shifted over to my own site here in August 2006. And while I still write reviews every week for Comic Book Resources, that doesn’t mean that I’ll miss writing reviews here a great deal. To those who have linked or responded to reviews, or merely posted some appreciation from time to time, my sincere thanks. To my peers who are writing their own reviews, my admiration. And to the people who, eight years later, keep posting in the comments section of the Queen Bee review hoping for a sequel… while sadly I don’t think your wish will ever come true, I do admire your persistence and eternal hope.

(And speaking of which, I’m changing the comments feature so that they close after a certain number of days. Sorry, Queen Bee fans.)

I do hope to occasionally post a review or two here, namely ones that for whatever reason (more than anything else, not fitting into the weekly review format) wouldn’t work on CBR, but we’ll see how that goes. For now, no promises. But again, my thanks, and I’m sorry that it’s taken so long to admit the inevitable had occurred.

You may (or may not) have noticed that there have been no posts since October 2012. I feel like I should explain why that happened.

Originally, the plan was simple: take a week’s break while I took care of some real world commitments, ones that were going to take up all the free time I normally had to write reviews for Read About Comics. Except those commitments grew. And grew. And grew. And by the time they started to die down, a lot of time had passed.

“I’m going to start back up next weekend,” I’d tell myself each Sunday night. And then more things would rear their ugly head, and every time I thought I was free and clear… well, you get the idea by now. These aren’t excuses, rather just an explanation of what’s been going on.

That said, in the next few weeks, I promise reviews will return. Honest. I’ve got a stack of great books here that I want to cover. One way or another, it will happen.

So thanks for your patience, and sorry for the ridiculously long delay.

I just received word today that the Post Office branch which hosts my PO Box (and which I opened back in 1999 when I started reviewing for iComics.com) is closing later this year. If you are a publisher/agent/cartoonist who used this address, please email me and I’d be more than happy to pass along my new contact information. Thank you!

Between travel and helping run the Ignatz Awards for this month’s Small Press Expo (SPX), the site is going on a slight break while I’m away from the computer (although not away from comics).

If you’re in the Washington DC area the weekend of September 11-12, do make sure to swing by! It’s a great show, and I say that not as someone who used to run it, but as someone who enjoyed going to the show so much that I wanted to help work on it. Just make sure to bring your wallet, there’s a tremendous amount of great stuff in store for you to buy.

Just a quick note to apologize for the lack of updates, recently. What I thought would be a short break for the holidays stretched into much more thanks to work, travel, and other obligations.

The good news is that new reviews should return starting on January 25th. I’d hoped to get this moving sooner than that, but I’d rather get up and running at full strength again. Thanks for your patience!

I don’t often put personal notes here, but I just wanted to let all of my readers know that I’m taking a week off while I take care of some much-needed surgery on December 15th.

It’s nothing too serious—I’m having my gallbladder removed—but I suspect a few days will be spent in bed instead of at the computer. (On the bright side, I’m hoping to get a lot of reading done.) And as bile is a reviewer’s best friend at times, I figure it would be best to wait until it levels back out before jumping back into the reviewing seat.

Expect a limited number of reviews for the last two weeks of the year (with the holidays, it will be a reduced schedule) and then back to full steam in 2009!

Just letting all the readers know that the site is taking a very short break; while I normally try to write my reviews one-to-two weeks ahead, with the Small Press Expo (SPX) this weekend all my free time has gone towards it instead of writing reviews.

After the show’s over and I get a chance to catch my breath, though, new reviews will resume. Thanks so much for your patience!

(And if you’re in the Washington DC area, do make sure to swing by! It’s a great show, and I say that not as someone who used to run it (and is now in charge of the Ignatz Awards), but as someone who enjoyed going to the show so much that I wanted to help work on it. Come on over! Buy some stuff!)